Tag: Paris

“EDUCATION DEPARTMENT NEEDS A KICKING”.

 

 

EDUCATION MINISTRY HINDRANCE TO SKILLS TRAINING.

As the skills and productivity crisis deepens, the Department for Education has come under savage attack from the mayors of Greater Manchester and the Liverpool City region.

Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram are getting into their stride in speaking for the North on a range of issues as was evidenced at a packed Downtown meeting this week. There wasn’t a single reference to strained relations between the core cities of Liverpool and Manchester, just a demonstration of the easy relationship that the two politicians share. This is important for the northern voice. Oh, that it was replicated in Yorkshire where rival councils are knocking nine bells out of each other over devolution models. Or in Lancashire, Cheshire and Cumbria where to describe progress on devolution as glacial would be to insult those magnificent features of the natural world.

After their election in May both men had very different starts. Burnham acquired a large staff at his Oxford Street headquarters in Manchester, although he said he envied Rotheram’s ability to shape his own team. That was a reference to the “Mary Celeste” situation faced by the Liverpool City Region mayor when he took office. Rotheram inherited no staff and a difficult relationship with Liverpool city mayor Joe Anderson.

Both men were just back from visits to Paris and New York and have realised that they need to impress the world, not just the government, that the North is a great place to invest in.

Raising skill levels is one of their main aims and you’d think the Department for Education would be an ally. Not so apparently. Rotheram said it was the least responsive department in Whitehall and needed a good kicking. The mayors wanted to control skills spending locally and show young people that there are routes to success other than through university by boosting vocational training. Burnham had been to his kid’s Year 9 options meeting where the ICT teacher had no takers while the pupils queued for humanities subjects.

Now in office the mayors want to tone down the politics to appeal to business. They feel firms in the two sub regions would feel more comfortable dealing with them than the highly politically charged Westminster village. They are working with other elected mayors including West Midlands Tory Mayor Andy Street.

Transport is another area where the mayors have given a voice to the North. With Downtown providing the launch pad they had launched a salvo of criticism over the government’s broken promises in the summer. They claimed it had born fruit to some extent with Liverpool City Region getting two “touch points” with HS2 and the Chancellor announcing a £400m cash boost for northern transport at the party conference. All well and good but still small potatoes compared with transport spending in London.

While stressing that their door was open to business, the mayors fired a shot across the bows of house builders saying the emphasis on developers needs had to change to provide the affordable housing that is in short supply. Andy Burnham made a striking remark that may meet with a mixed reception in his outer boroughs. He said they needed to shrink their retail offer and increase the space for housing.

Finally, on Brexit, the mayors had recently met with Brexit Minister David Davis. Burnham had told him that Greater Manchester exported 58% of its exports to the EU compared with the national average of 44%. No deal would be a very bad deal for him. Rotheram, also a Remainer, nevertheless said the port of Liverpool stood ready to welcome global opportunities post Brexit.

It is too early to say whether these politicians will actually deliver their visions, but people can begin to see how City Region mayors might make a difference in the absence of what we really need, which is powerful regional government.

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INTO THE BLACK HOLE.

 

It is understandable that when our stricken ally, France, calls for our help, that the Prime Minister wants to respond. It is also understandable that when the crimes of Daesh are carried out on the streets of Paris, Beirut and elsewhere that we want to lash out.

Although understandable we should not think that our joining in the bombing of Daesh in Syria will bring peace any nearer. We would be better concentrating on stopping the financing of Daesh, stopping or countering its poisonous message on the internet. Then there is Daesh’s oil sales with rumours that Turkey is a customer. If true we cannot take seriously Ankara’s desire to be a member of the EU.

Turkey isn’t the only big power with a complex agenda in the Syrian crisis. David Cameron has failed to give an answer to these complexities and therefore cannot claim to have a long term strategy. He refers to talks in Vienna but look at the agendas countries will bring to the table. Russia is currently committed to propping up Bashar al-Assad, the leader of Syria. There is talk that President Putin will look for a more acceptable alternative. There is little sign of it. Russia wants to send out a message to the world that it supports its friends. The retention of Assad, even in the short term is totally unacceptable to the “seventy thousand” armed opponents that David Cameron thinks are going to abandon fighting Assad to fight Daesh.

This is a major flaw in Cameron’s strategy. There is no prospect of any nation or group of nations putting enough effective boots on the ground to conduct a land war and conquer Daesh’s headquarters in Raqqa. The West doesn’t want to get burned again and most of the Arab armies are understandably terrified of Daesh brutality. Most Arab countries are not even conducting air strikes. Their rivalries and interests are too complex for them to become effectively involved it seems.

So what is going to happen? I called this blog “Into The Black Hole”, because that is where we are headed I fear. We will join France and the USA in bombing Daesh targets. The terrorists will get a propaganda boost from it. Sooner or later they will commit a major atrocity on British streets and what will we do then with our “no boots on the ground” policy?

There should be a solution to such terrible wars, the United Nations. Soon after it was first set up, the Korean War was ended by UN action. It has passed a resolution calling for military action against Daesh now but there is no UN army or the sort of leadership of a group of armies that prevailed in Korea. The UN is hobbled by lack of funding and often the self interested vetos of members of the Security Council.

Syria is a lethal cocktail of violence, frustration, big power self interest and regional rivalry. I wish I could see a way out of the black hole but I can’t at the moment.

A VORTEX OF VIOLENCE OR LONG TERM REMEDIES

 

We may have to live with terrorism for generations but there are things that can be done to try and avoid us getting into the vortex of violence that the Parisian madmen want us to descend into.

It is not in any way to give a scintilla of justification to what happened in Paris to suggest that the massacre has historic links to Britain and France’s colonial past. History is a rolling story with one event linked to another. In the 1920s our two countries carved up the Middle East with no regard to the local Arab interest. Britain promised a homeland for the Jews whilst promising to protect the interests of the Palestinian Arabs.

When the colonial era ended and the Arabs became responsible for governing the Middle East themselves we saw the setting up of military dictatorships and even more significantly the hoarding of the vast oil wealth of the region in the hands of a few. If that money had been fairly distributed across the region, it might now have been an area of prosperity. Instead unemployment and instability has created a sense of anger and hopelessness on which terrorism has fed.

The last chapter of the recent history of the Middle East saw the western powers returning to remove the military dictators who’s only virtue was to keep a lid on the festering divisions. Following the removal of Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein all hell has broken loose. I’m not a spokesman for the Stop The War coalition who issued a tweet (subsequently repudiated) saying we were reaping the whirlwind, however it is true. But “we” includes not just western countries who made bad choices in the Middle East, but greedy oil sheiks and religious fanatics who ought to know that the true basis of both Christianity and Islam is to love thy neighbour and do good.

So what is to be done now? In the short term ISIL’s territory has to be conquered by local troops backed up by western air support. But that won’t be the end of them, there a re plenty of failed states where they will emerge again unless fundamental issues are resolved in the region. The most important is better wealth distribution. Then comes some really controversial changes. The creation of Palestine and Kurdistan (the least they deserve for being the only effective troops fighting ISIS) as nation states and possible boundary changes to ease Sunni and Shia tensions.

At home a massive “not in my name” demonstration by our British Muslim colleagues would help ease the worrying rise of entirely unjustified Islamaphobia. The Chancellor next week should protect funds for community policing. It is the height of folly to damage that part of the police service which is often the first to detect extremists. And finally the Prime Minister needs to be careful to avoid gloating when we, sometimes necessarily, execute terrorists without trial. His demeanour in announcing the death of Jihaddi John was in marked contrast to the remarks of some of the people who’d actually had relatives beheaded by the ghastly murderer.

By language and deed we must not be goaded into the vortex of violence.

 

THE LONG LEGACY OF WORLD WAR ONE

100 years ago the first shots were being fired in the First World War. At the end of it the Ottoman Empire was split up into the states that are involved in the awful carnage that we are seeing every night on our TV screens.

 

The situation is serious and is already affecting us here. My colleague Michael Taylor has addressed the street tension in Manchester over the Gaza issue in his Downtown blog. 500 people from Britain have gone to the Syrian civil war. Some may return to try and practise jihad on our streets. On the business front the fragile recovery could be reversed by more general war in the Middle East and interruption of fuel supplies.

 

There have been many Middle East crises before. This one has two new characteristics. Firstly social media is centre stage in the propaganda and recruitment war. Everything is accelerated. Rumours and lies rub shoulders with the truth and people choose what to believe and what determines their action. Secondly the United States is largely absent. After the unwise involvement of George Bush we now have the isolationism of President Obama. The decision to pivot American foreign policy towards the Pacific might have had a certain logic to it when Obama took office. However as the only world super power you take your eyes off the Middle East and Russia at your peril.

 

There is undoubtedly a paradox in United States involvement in the Middle East. On the one hand it is the hated symbol of Western imperialism and ultimate defender of Israel. On the other hand it retains massive military power and the potential to bring people together (The Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978).

 

The situation is so bloody and complex that the likelihood is that the Middle East will remain a running sore for decades to come. There may be ceasefires and short term agreements but the heady mix of vast economic disparity among the people, religious fanaticism and unresolved issues of national identity may be too difficult to resolve.

 

In 1919 the world was a different place. One set of Empires: Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia and Ottoman Turkey were replaced by another set: Britain and France with the United States beginning to play a role.

 

Lloyd George, Clemenceau and President Wilson met in Paris without the chatter of social media and 24 hour news channels and carved up the Middle East and Africa. Although the superiority of the white man was beginning to be challenged, the western powers still called the shots and huge mistakes were made.

 

It was perhaps regrettable that T.E Lawrence’s idea for a Greater Arabia was not adopted. The secret of the Ottoman Empire was to govern lightly by collecting the taxes but letting local Sunni and Shia leaders run their areas.

 

The Kurds should have been given their own state and it goes without saying more thought should have been given to the implications for the Palestinians of the Balfour Declaration that set in train the creation of Israel.

 

The Palestinian issue is almost intractable but ultimately could a bargain be struck whereby Israel and its settlers withdraw to the pre-1967 borders in return for a demilitarised Palestinian state being set up in the West Bank and Gaza? Jerusalem should become an international city under the control of the United Nations with freedom of worship for all faiths.

 

It is easy to write such a proposal and it will offend many but the alternative seems to be continuing misery for the Palestinians and insecurity for the Israelis.